More exciting news for the ongoing literary award season. Edith Hammar’s graphic novel Portal was nominated for the Prisma Literature Prize in the Series of the Year category and Niko Hallikainen’s novel Big Wet Secret in the Nordic Work of the Year category.
Portal, Edith Hammar’s second graphic novel is a beautifully melancholic tale where fantasy and reality, the past and the present, skillfully intertwine to weave a story of longing for a bygone era.
Jury’s motivation:
With an evocative visual narrative, Edith Hammar paints a dreamy and claustrophobic winter bubble where past and present meet. Portal is a story about queer time travel that depicts both the universal and the very specific in the longing for community.
Niko Hallikainen’s second novel A Big Wet Secret is a masterful depiction of class differences, adolescent intensities and insecurities, awakening homosexuality and devastating alcoholism. Hyper-realistic in its detail, the novel is an intense, violent, corporeal and sensual story of growing up poor in the 1990’s eastern Helsinki.
Jury motivation:
Suuri märkä salaisuus is a poetic novel about Finland in the 1990s. Eastern Helsinki gets its own flavour and voice in this beautiful and raw coming-of-age story that follows a boy growing up with a single mother. Niko Hallikainen’s novel is a queer portrayal of class divisions and the brutality of capitalism that we have longed to read.
Prisma is a newly established literary prize which recognises and awards contemporary LGBTI+ literature. Its awarded to works that depict queer experiences and/or queer lives, i.e. experiences that combat cis and heteronormative notions of sexuality, gender and relationships. Prisma is organised by PAGE 28 and Bögbibblan. With Prisma, Bögbibblan and PAGE 28 want to recognise and reward works that explore and renew queer literature and engage a queer audience with their subversive potential and craftsmanship. Prisma will be awarded in seven categories at a gala at Malmö Opera on the 11th of December 2023. The seven jury groups consist of 47 librarians, literary scholars, researchers, critics and authors who together read, nominate and select the winner in each category. Read more about the prize here.
Our warmest congratulations to all nominees!